The present invention relates to computers and, more particularly, to a software tool for assisting a computer user in converting a software image operational on a source personal computer for use on a target personal computer.
Usually personal computers are supplied by their manufacturer with an operating system and certain application programs already installed on the hard disk. However, many computer users wish to install their own custom image, or retain the working environment from their old PC, but face the problem that building a software image like this for use with a new personal computer can be very time consuming. The same issue is faced by potential purchasers of computers who first wish to test a new model with the production environment or applications used for instance throughout a large company.
The task of recreating the computing environment will generally involve a user installing the operating system, then all their desired applications. Finally the user must copy all their data files from wherever they are stored. At best, this process will take several hours. However, if it is unsuccessful, the problems can be difficult to diagnose and resolve.
Specialised transfer applications, such as the xe2x80x9cAlohabob""s PC Relocatorxe2x80x9d product available from Eisenworld Corp, do exist for copying applications and data from an old PC to the new one. However, these applications are generally not ideal, primarily because of the difficulty of distinguishing user applications from operating system accessories. Since the old and new PC often do not have the same operating system version, the resulting configuration can be unstable, with old operating system files overwriting newer ones already present on the new PC.
Disk cloning applications, such as the Norton Ghost Application available from Symantec Corporation, are also widely used, but these face the problem that the new PC will usually be made up of different hardware components and therefore the correct drivers for the new hardware components will need to be installed from somewhere. Since the hardware components of the new PC may not have existed when the old PC was bought, the correct drivers may not be present on either the hard disk of the old PC or whatever accompanying support media were supplied with it. The drivers for the new hardware will therefore have to be obtained from elsewhere.
Using this disk cloning approach, it has been found (i) that conflicts can occur when a new version of a driver is installed when in fact an older driver is already present on the disk and (ii) that configuration settings, such as the computer name, TCP/IP settings and the like are lost so that the drivers need to be reconfigured, which takes time and requires the necessary settings to be known by the person carrying out the operation.
The complexity of modern PC systems means that these kind of versioning and hardware conflicts are hard to avoid, particularly given the likelihood that some or all of the software components will, to a greater or lesser extent, contain bugs.
The present invention is directed to speeding up and easing generally the migration of a software environment from a source computer to a target computer.
In brief, this is achieved by a software image transition aid for acting on a software image that is transferred from a source computer to a target computer, the aid comprising: a bootable storage media with stored thereon one or more operating systems arranged to load when the target computer is booted from the storage media and program code elements arranged to modify the cloned disk image under the control of the operating system or systems, so that when the target computer is rebooted from the transferred image the target computer will reach an operational state.
In preferred embodiments, the program code elements can be arranged to: identify the hardware of the target computer; analyse the software image on the hard disk; identify files to be added to the transferred image; and copy the identified files from a repository to the transferred image, whereby when the target computer is rebooted from the transferred image, an operating system therein finds the required files.
This kind of tool can be used in the following way. First the user transfers the complete operational software image from the target PC onto a source PC either by using a suitable cloning tool of which there are several commercially available, or by physically removing the disk drive containing the software image from the source computer and fitting it into the target computer.
Then, before being booted from the cloned image, the target computer is booted from the image transition aid. The image transition aid acts on the software image stored on the hard disk in the target computer to at least add any necessary files, for instance missing drivers. In preferred embodiments, other operations are performed at this stage also, for instance drivers that are already present in the image may be removed in order to ensure a clean installation of the new drivers.
Once the process in completed the target computer is rebooted to load the operating system that was transferred with the software image. The operating system finds all the files necessary for it to be operational on the target computer, and is able to boot.
The invention is based, at least in part, on consideration of the problems encountered using the known methods of disk image migration. It has been found that adding support for the target hardware is an important issue and that by adding this support before the operating system image is booted on the target machine for the first time, it is possible to prevent numerous error messages, and avoid the user having to manually respond to lots of questions that would be generated by the operating system when discovering new hardware or installing new drivers.